MacAllister's Baby (15 page)

‘Your breakfast guest.’ Christine stood and shook hands with Elisabeth. ‘It’s so lovely to meet you, Elisabeth, and I’m very sorry to interrupt. You must excuse me, I have a phone call or two to make, but I do hope to see you again.’

‘I’ll see you out,’ Angus said, and squeezed Elisabeth’s shoulders before following Christine out of the kitchen and through his living room to the front door.

‘I understand your change of priorities,’ Christine said to him in a low tone, her eyebrows raised in amusement. ‘That’s the teacher, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t want the press involved.’

She shrugged her narrow shoulders. ‘Fair enough. Though she’s going to have to deal with it sooner or later if she’s going to stick around.’

‘And that’s for her to decide. Not the media.’

Christine smiled and pecked him on the cheek. ‘She looks charming. Give me a ring if your priorities change again.’

‘Go home and relax, Christine. Enjoy the weekend.’

‘I don’t need to tell you to enjoy it yourself.’ She went down his front stairs, her car keys jingling.

When Angus got back to the kitchen, Elisabeth was standing exactly where he’d left her. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t expecting Christine today.’

‘That’s fine. Of course you have a life and a career,’ Elisabeth said, but he could see some of the tightness returning to her face again.

‘Hey.’ He took her in his arms and held her until he felt her relax a little. She smelled of his shampoo. It smelled better on her. ‘I’m sorry your shower was lonely.’ He let his hands creep inside the robe and rest on her bare waist.

She shrugged. ‘Just as well. If you’d joined me we’d still be in there and I’m hungry.’

‘How about this,’ he said. ‘We’ll have coffee, I’ll make breakfast, we’ll bring it up to bed and then we’ll take another shower together. And then I’ll make some phone calls and cancel my appointments until Monday.’ He was meant to be at Magnum this weekend, but Henry and the team could handle it without him.

‘I deserve a weekend off,’ he said. ‘And I want to spend it with you.’

Elisabeth smiled and settled closer into his embrace. ‘I deserve a weekend off too. Listen, I’m sorry I drove your publicist away if you had to talk business.’

He was tempted to explain the conversation he’d just had with Christine, but then he thought better of it. He’d only recently convinced Elisabeth that he was interested in Jennifer and Danny’s welfare in the first place. It wouldn’t do any good to remind her that this whole thing had started out as a publicity scheme.

Especially since the publicity angle wasn’t even going to happen.

He kissed her, and said, ‘It wasn’t important.’

Although he thought maybe it was the most important decision he’d made in a long time.

CHAPTER NINE

T
HE
interior of Luciano’s looked the same: dark walls, marble-topped tables, the grey-haired Italian man behind the counter near the espresso machine. Angus MacAllister looked the same: tall, smiling, dimple-chinned, tempting.

Elisabeth supposed she probably looked the same, too, except for the odd collection of clothes she was wearing—her little black dress with a designer shirt of Angus’s knotted over the top, and a pair of flat beaded shoes she’d picked up the day before browsing in the Portobello Road Saturday market.

Aside from the clothes and the day of the week it was all exactly the same as the last time they’d been here together, Elisabeth thought. The only things that had changed weren’t visible.

She slid into her seat laughing, shaking off the sparse raindrops from her hair, as Angus shouted a greeting to Luciano in Italian. They’d seen the rain clouds approaching as they’d walked hand in hand through Kensington Gardens and Angus had bet her a coffee that they’d make it to Luciano’s before it started raining.

Angus’s Italian was considerably better than hers, but when she recognised the words
‘caffè filtrato’
she put her hand on his arm to stop him ordering her filter coffee with skimmed milk.

‘I’ll have a cappuccino this time,’ she said.

Angus’s smile was blinding. He kissed her on the cheek. ‘You won’t regret it.’

‘Best in London, I hear.’

The rest of his order was incomprehensible to her, so she had no idea what Angus and Luciano were laughing about as Angus pulled his chair over to be closer to her and sat down.

‘Everybody in the world likes you,’ she marvelled.

‘Why wouldn’t they? I’m a nice bloke.’

‘Yes, but I mean everybody. Every single person we’ve spoken to this weekend was happy to see you—all the stallholders in Portobello Road, the publican at lunch today. Even strangers say hello to you.’

He shrugged. ‘It’s the nice side of being famous.’

She shook her head. ‘No, it’s not that. You work hard for it. I’ll never forget how you charmed Harjeet at school in under five minutes. And what you’ve done with Jennifer and Danny. It’s important to you that people like you, isn’t it?’

Luciano came with their coffees and a plate of flaky almond-crusted pastries and exchanged another joke with Angus in Italian before he went back behind his counter. Angus picked up his espresso, took a sip with his eyes closed in appreciation, and then put his cup down contemplatively.

‘It’s always been important,’ he said. ‘It started out as a coping strategy, I suppose. My parents never wanted to have very much to do with me. They were so spectacularly uninterested in who I was that I saw them exactly four times between the ages of twelve and sixteen.’ He took another sip of his coffee. ‘I guess I’ve always wanted to prove that I was likeable.’

She touched the back of his hand, running her finger along one of the jagged scars. ‘Where did you go during the school holidays?’

‘To friends’ houses, mainly. Or to our house in the Scottish Highlands; we had staff there. Once I got there and they’d given the staff a holiday—forgot I was coming home, I think. I was ten years old and I spent the entire Easter holiday alone.’ His face was wry, but Elisabeth could see the hurt. ‘That’s when I first discovered how to cook.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘Abroad somewhere—that’s what they do. They have a house in London, but I haven’t been there since I was sixteen and I announced to my tutor that I was going to quit school and apprentice in a kitchen. My parents were so appalled that they flew over from Buenos Aires and shut me in the house in Belgravia for a week trying to talk me out of it. Eventually I climbed out the window.’ He laughed. ‘I’m more like Danny than you think I am.’

‘I’m sorry, Angus.’

She pictured Angus as a boy, dark-haired and slender, wandering the venerable corridors of his school, laughing, joking, making as many friends as he could to fill up his loneliness.

Her own childhood had had plenty of lonely times. But she’d never actually been alone. And, she realised now, she’d always been safe—even if she hadn’t felt it at the time.

‘My parents were a little strange,’ she said, ‘but they were always there. They loved me. Even if they did spend most of the eighties living in nudist camps.’

Angus laughed. ‘If I’d had the choice of parents, I’d have chosen nude Canadian hippies.’

‘You would’ve got bored with the lentils, though.’ She took a sip of her cappuccino. It was frothy, creamy, and divine. ‘You’re right about the coffee.’

He nodded absently. ‘You say everybody likes me. But you didn’t like me when you first met me.’

She remembered the last time she’d sat in this café, tense and suspicious. As opposed to the last two days, when she’d laughed and talked and eaten and made love with Angus MacAllister to her heart’s content.

In her favourite Shakespeare comedy, people were transformed because of fairies or love potions or a magical night in the woods. In her case, it had taken one wonderful weekend.

It was midsummer’s day today, too, she realised. The twenty-first of June.

Of course, in a Shakespeare comedy, the play ended and the transformations were permanent. She wasn’t sure that real life worked like that.

But for the length of a midsummer weekend’s dream, she could believe it.

‘I was afraid of you,’ she said. ‘I’m more like Jennifer than you think.’

He held one of the pastries up to her lips and she bit into it. It was flaky and sweet and it melted in her mouth.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can understand that. I mean, it’s not every day you meet a man who’s hung like a—’

She nearly spit out her mouthful of pastry laughing.

‘What?’ He feigned shock. ‘You mean that’s not why you were afraid of me?’

She shook her head and swallowed. ‘No. You reminded me of someone I had a relationship with.’

Angus sobered. ‘Somebody who hurt you?’

‘Hurt is an understatement.’ She toyed with her coffee-cup. ‘I was so in love with Robin that I couldn’t see straight. And he was charming, like you. Arrogant.’

This time, Angus didn’t make a joke about being arrogant. She was glad.

‘He became quite a well-known actor, too, though he wasn’t when we were together. He had that gift you have.’ She gestured with her hands. ‘Getting people to warm to him. Making them feel like they’re the only person in the universe. It’s very seductive. Even when it doesn’t mean anything.’

Angus’s brows drew together. ‘You thought I was being insincere.’

‘At first. And then not insincere, precisely, but…’ She thought. ‘In the end, it’s hard to believe that somebody really cares for you when they seem to care for everybody. My parents were like that a little. They always had somebody new staying with us, or some new cause to go on marches about. The difference with them was that they made sure I knew they cared about me, too. Robin only seemed to care.’

‘What did he do to you?’

She studied the pattern the froth and chocolate powder made on the side of her coffee-cup.

She wanted to tell him. As she’d wanted to tell him about Miss Wood and the oatmeal cookies. As if by magic, when she was with Angus, she was someone who shared her worries and her sorrows.

‘I got pregnant,’ she said. ‘I was silly in love; I didn’t care about the consequences. I forgot about birth control. When I told Robin, he didn’t want to know. He was far too interested in making new friends and finding new lovers.’

Angus’s hand had crept to hers, as hers had to his when he’d been talking about his parents. ‘And the baby?’

‘I was going to go back to Canada to have it. I lost it at five months. So I stayed here.’

She heard him draw in a long breath and let it go. His hand tightened around hers. ‘I’m sorry, Elisabeth.’

Even years after losing her baby, she didn’t think she could look at the sympathy in his eyes. She stirred her coffee, crushing the foam.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘it made me wary of good-looking charming men whom I’m ridiculously attracted to.’

He raised her hand to his lips and brushed a kiss across her knuckles. ‘I’m not insincere, Elisabeth.’

‘I know.’ Or at least he didn’t mean to be, which was almost the same thing. Deliberately, she made her voice light as she looked up into his face. ‘You so deeply want to be liked that you chose a profession that exists purely to give others pleasure.’

Angus laughed. ‘I never thought of it that way before. I thought it was because I was an inherent sensualist.’

‘That too.’

He rubbed the back of her hand against his cheek; it was beginning to be rough with stubble since she’d watched him shave this morning. ‘I’ve enjoyed being a sensualist with you this weekend.’

‘Me too.’ She picked up one of the pastries and fed him as he’d done to her, watching his strong white teeth, his tongue licking a crumb from his lips. ‘You know, you never told us what your favourite food was, after you made us tell you.’

‘That’s easy. Soft-boiled eggs and toast soldiers.’

Elisabeth was so surprised she nearly dropped the pastry. ‘That’s it? No caviare or truffle oil or fancy Damien-Virata-style weirdness?’

‘That’s it. Hot slippery yolk and crunchy buttery toast. I love the feeling of cracking the egg open with my spoon. A little bit of salt sprinkled over it with my fingers. Brilliant.’

‘I expected there to be some ice cream, at least.’

‘Chocolate ice cream is a close second. But soft-boiled eggs and toast soldiers are the only thing I can remember anyone making just for me when I was a kid.’

His face looked so wistful and lonely for a moment that Elisabeth leaned over the table and kissed him on the lips. Wanting to take that loneliness away.

She tasted pastry and coffee and Angus and with the kiss she remembered all the other kisses they’d shared this weekend. Swift and stolen, walking along the road hand in hand; laughing, teasing on his couch; slow and passionate while water sluiced over their bodies in the shower. The first one, a gentle touching in the cold.

And after all that kissing, all the times they’d made love, explored, learned each other, she still wanted more.

Her tongue touched his and she heard him moan deep in his throat. She remembered his gravelly voice shouting out her name. The driving intensity in his body at his climax.

‘I want you,’ she whispered when they broke apart.

‘Race you back to my house.’

She glanced over his shoulder and saw the afternoon had gone dark. Rain poured down outside the windows. She realised she’d been hearing its sound for a while, without listening to it.

‘It’s raining,’ she said.

‘Even better. I love it when you’re wet.’

The sexy
double entendre
shot another pang of desire through her. She pushed back her chair and ran to the door of the café. ‘
Ciao,
Luciano!’ she called and burst through the door into the wet air, leaving Angus behind her still reaching for his wallet.

The rain was cool on her bare legs as she ran, and plastered Angus’s shirt to her body. She was more than halfway to his house before he caught up with her.

‘That wasn’t fair,’ he gasped, grabbing her by the waist from behind.

‘It’s not only ex-public schoolboys who can play dirty.’ She tried to hook her leg around his, to trip him up, but he deftly avoided her.